Orthographic neighborhood size effect in Chinese character naming: Orthographic and phonological activations

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• 作者：Qing-Lin Li^a ; ^b ; Hong-Yan Bi^a ; ^{bihy@psych.ac.cn} ; Tong-Qi Wei^a ; ^b ; Bao-Guo Chen^c
• 关键词：Orthographic neighborhood ; Neighborhood frequency ; Chinese naming
• 刊名：Acta Psychologica
• 出版年：2011
• 出版时间：January 2011
• 年：2011
• 卷：136
• 期：1
• 页码：35-41
• 全文大小：289 K

文摘

The present study examined the effects of orthographic neighborhood (N) size on the cognitive processes underlying Chinese character reading. Previous research has shown increasing N size facilitates word naming and recognition performance in alphabetic languages. Experiment 1 revealed that a large N size was associated with a general inhibition of processes underlying character reading, in contrast to previous findings with alphabetic languages. This inhibitory effect was influenced by regularity and consistency. Experiment 2 sought to assess the effects of higher-frequency neighbors on character naming performance. The results revealed that higher-frequency neighbors with different pronunciation to the target interfered with the phonological retrieval of targets. We propose that this type of interference may have caused the N size effect observed in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 3 revealed that a large N size facilitated target naming in the absence of higher-frequency neighbors. The current results shed light on the processes underlying character naming, and we propose possible cognitive mechanisms of the N size effect on Chinese character naming.